The faculty who participated in the NSF iUSE grant-funded Access and Inclusion Project have reported back on their strategies and experiences. As we gather more information, these case studies will be made more robust, but for now, here's a sample of the strategies implemented by the Access and Inclusion faculty in the 2016-17 academic year.

Rebecca Johnson--One of my favorite books is How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching by Susan A. Ambrose and others. The chapter I turn to again and again is “What Factors Motivate Students to Learn?” Ambrose, et al, make it clear that while we may worry about how to engage students, ultimately it’s the students who have to make decisions about how they spend their time and focus their attention.

Rebecca Johnson--Both the National Technical Institute for the Deaf and the Rochester Institute of Technology have a long history of exploring and advancing issues of access and inclusion in a variety of classroom situations. The first two resources, below, ClassAct and Teach2Connect, were developed at NTID and provide a wealth of resources and stories of how individual faculty have addressed access and inclusion in their classes.

Rebecca Johnson--The Disability Services Office at RIT has compiled a list of specific practices for teaching students with particular disabilities. We’ve taken some of that information on their website and turned it around, looking at which practices can help the most students.* This list is a great example of how Universal Design for Learning works. While each of these is an evidence-based strategy for supporting a student with a particular disability, any of these practices can help all of your students.

Rebecca Johnson--Teaching and Learning Services provides support for faculty who wish to foster access and inclusivity in their classrooms. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is helpful framework for many of these activities.

Rebecca Johnson--Universal Design for Learning (UDL) combines what we know about how learning works with a commitment to providing course materials that are engaging and accessible to produce a learning experience that benefits all students. David Rose at the Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST) in Boston first conceived of UDL, and called for instructors to provide multiple means of representation (how can you provide different avenues into course content?), multiple mean

Marybeth Koon--As instructors create and adopt more digital teaching resources, they must also ensure that students with disabilities can access those materials. This section of the Accessibility Tool Kit 1.0 provides instructors with resources that will help them make their materials accessible to students with disabilities. As you look at this list, consider that resources for making online courses accessible are also useful to faculty who teach in a blended or flipped modality.

Rebecca Johnson--If you’ve walked across a parking lot toward the kiosk, repeating your license plate number under your breath, only to have to turn back to your car and refresh your memory because an ambulance drove by, you’ve experienced Cognitive Load Theory (CLT). How does CLT play out in the classroom? To understand that, we'll need to think first about memory and how we learn.

Rebecca Johnson--Sandi Connelly teaches a large general education biology class at RIT and was looking for a way to add variety to her assignments. She decided to ask students to make brief videos that explained some aspect of the content they’d been learning. Video assignments are not common in STEM classes; students are unlikely to have much prior experience on which to base their work. Connelly provided both a broad set of guidelines for these video assignments, and then a more specific articulation of an assignment related to particular course content.